Comments on: Profile - VitalSource

By: Natasha Yi

Natasha Yi — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:53:37 +0000

Hey!…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Wednesday .

By: Ruben Safir

Ruben Safir — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 02:54:21 +0000

Vitalbooks is a bad news company which has tried, for example, to eliminate all paper books on Dental Medicine in order to rent the rights to Dentists world over with a bizzarre DRM scheme.

See LULU.COM for a much better solution…

Ruben

By: game

game — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 03:08:21 +0000

belching joyfully ridiculously?barrage validity…. Thanks!!!

By: credit card

credit card — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 07:52:54 +0000

conscience arbitrates Grimes encryptions!bullet squeezes,

By: MIhail

MIhail — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 05:14:27 +0000

Police have been checking vehicles in a zone around the site of the discovery, where poultry movements are restricted.

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 20:46:13 +0000

No, dru, you’re actually right. 99% of students per se are not. But a far greater share of IT students are running OSS on Linux, that’s for sure. So are many government institutions in several countries and several schools.

And big corporations.

But I have to agree that the general public isn’t Linux-aware. Just like there are huge ammounts of people who are not IT-aware, too.

By: Dru

Dru — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 20:41:30 +0000

I know this sounds like herecy, but I would bet that 99% of the students out there are not running Linux.

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 20:31:02 +0000

It used to be like that, yes. Nowadays it’s a little more pacific than that, though, thankfully. Most people have libraries for QT and GTK installed by default nowadays anyway, because it makes no sense to pick one toolkit over the other and totally ignore the rest of the applications.

By: Willie Abrams

Willie Abrams — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 20:19:37 +0000

I don’t doubt our ability to use a given toolkit per se, it is the politics of picking a Linux toolkit.

If you do GNOME, the KDE folks come after you. Or vice versa. Or at least that is how it seemed to be. Is it still like that?

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:40:39 +0000

Hey Willie, thanks for reading and dropping a comment about linux.

In my previous development endeavours with Linux (and other *nix environments) I’ve used GTK+, because it is GPL and widely available. I may be a little biased because I’ve used Gnome for a long long time (when I’m not on my mac) and have been a part of the dev team for a while - In fact, I’m working with Gnome and Google on a project that’ll launch in some days. But I do consider it the best widget toolkit for linux.

That said, why not look at the GTK documentation? It’s pretty easy to develop with, there’s hooks for a lot of programming languages and it is definitely a growing market you may want to explore with VS.

Good luck! Thanks again for your input, too!

By: Willie Abrams

Willie Abrams — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:32:29 +0000

Thanks for the feedback on pricing. Some of it is under our control, and some of it is under publisher control. Certainly, we want to have much better pricing. I will pass your comments along to those who can make a difference.

As for the Linux question (and the main reason I am posting)…What UI toolkit? This has been the confusing question to me. I think that is the major question that any app developer has to answer first. Any thoughts?

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 15:54:19 +0000

I guess they’re not sticking up to the “cheaper books” policy then. Good catch, juniorbonner, thanks for the input.

I’m not impressed by their prices, I’m impressed by their approach to the web-application world by doing a client-side application that connects to a server, much like iTunes does it.

By: juniorbonner

juniorbonner — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 15:49:32 +0000

so I had a look around at vitalsource, and not sure I am as impressed as you I’m afraid. Some of the books seem to be significantly more expensive than to buy from Amazon - for instance, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy is $55.49 to download but $37.80 to buy from Amazon (plus I can search inside the book at Amazon). Not sure why I would want to pay more to download a book than to have the real thing.

A lot of the cheap books seem to be ones that are already in the public domain and can easily be found for free online.